Project Description & Responsibilities
The World of Darkness was a PC MMO title being developed by CCP Games. The majority of my time on World of Darkness (WoD) was spent as the Product Owner of the World Building Team.
Responsibilities include:
Environment Art
World Building & Level Design
Modular Kit Strategy Development
Procedural Content Tool Design
Production Management
Technical Creative Direction
I led diverse, multi-disciplined teams with the goal of delivering a content complete game play world for WoD. As the team shifted to facilitate project goals it was made up of an ever changing combination of artists, engineers, tech artists, designers, producers and writers at any given time.
Architecture Modular Kits
I developed a series of architecture modular kit proxies to establish asset standards that allowed for dynamic assembly by our procedural world building tool. Once a proxy kit was proven to handle a wide range of assembly solutions, the Environment Art Team was able to use the pieces to create the game ready assets.
Brownstone Architecture kit developed from proxies. I authored the trims while the environment art team I led delivered the rest of the modular pieces.
Procedural Content Population Tool
The goal of the architectural kits was to plug them into a procedural building tool that would populate assembled buildings out of the modular assets. I was tasked with creating the design for this tool and driving it’s development.
New Channel
World Building
The visual direction for WoD was large scale urban city environments with the technical challenge of them being built proceduraly. We began prototyping a procedural world building system that used hexagons as ground tiles. The hex ground tiles broke down modularly and were reassembled by the world building tool. The modular tiles held building volumes that were in turn populated by the content population tool.
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Procedural City Generation
The following screen-captures demonstrate the culmination of the procedural tool developed by the World Building teams that I led over the course of two years on the WoD development team. The city generated below demonstrates a fully functioning game play map complete with spawn points, NPCs, POIs, contextual visual content, territory zones, game-play markup collision, game-play resources and tile streaming LODs.
